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An interesting piece at NRO which reviews a new book by Robert Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind.

It traces features of Islam (and indeed Christianity) back to the very deepest roots, namely core assumptions about God's nature laid down centuries ago:

While Christianity recognizes the possibility of miracles, when God intervenes to supersede natural law, in Islam every nanosecond is the functional equivalent of a miracle, the result of God’s divine act.

Thus there is no law of gravity, only God’s will, determining moment by moment that the apple will fall from the tree. Neither is there any morality, no objective good and evil as we in the West would see it, only the arbitrary decrees of an all-powerful God...

As hard as it is for the secular Left to accept, Western culture is founded on and steeped in the Judeo-Christian assumption that our innate understanding of what is right is a direct reflection of God’s goodness and justice as reflected in His universal law, to which even He adheres.

We make a mistake when we assume other cultures are necessarily speaking the same moral language.

Assumptions. Tricky things.

That reminds me of this:

Another former colleague recently said to me, "the trouble with you is that you reduce everything to first principles!"

He's right. I do. 

The risk for someone who does that lies in sounding like the wily but annoying Irishman who tells a lost traveller trying to get to Dublin that it is "no good starting from here".

The key advantage in looking hard and regularly at First Principles is that one is less likely to build a tall edifice on wobbly foundations. And perhaps more likely to be a better source of advice as to when something tall and imposing is in fact risking collapse.

In Las Vegas later this month and looking for something cool to do away from the casinos?

This could be interesting.

Today the latest edition of DIPLOMAT magazine arrived.

I opened it to find an article written by me which I could not remember writing(!). So I read it with much enjoyment and appreciation.

Check it out. It describes my attempts as an argumentative young diplomat to persuade the Embassy in Belgrade in 1983/84 that the then Yugoslavia was possibly heading for a breakdown, with unfathomable consequences. To no avail.

Which prompted me at the time to write my legendary MTS, Non-MTS paper - as per one of my very first blog postings here.

My DIPLOMAT article describes what happened next:

I left the post in 1984. Back at HQ I went along to Personnel to discuss my future. ‘You are getting a reputation for being argumentative,’ said the frumpy HR lady. ‘Wouldn’t you argue if you saw disaster looming but everyone else ignored it?’ I replied in some exasperation.

‘See, you’re arguing again,’ came the smug response.

I still remember this conversation so vividly, not least the supercilious but unimaginative female on the other side of the table. I pointed out to her that it had been annoying dealing with senior Embassy colleagues who instructed me to go out and talk to Yugoslav dissidents and get their devasting observations on the fecklessness of the Yugo-communists, but then could not spell when they wrote afterwards that these people were 'obviously dissaffected'.

"I find that hard to believe", she sniffed.

Pshaw.

And so I moved onto the Air Services Desk and then FCO Speechwriting. The Cold War ended. A mere 300 weeks or so after I left Belgrade, Yugoslavia indeed collapsed into appalling violence and ghastly war crimes. Huge British and international resources were poured in to help stop the fighting and pay for post-conflict reconstruction.

Yes, I had been argumentative. I had even been right. What I see now, with the benefit of much more experience, was that I had not been convincing.

Not that it would have made much difference had I been convincing. Finance Ministries don’t want to adjust their plans to warnings of disaster. They prefer to ignore the problem and instead pay out reluctantly as and when disaster creates real problems, which the taxpayer is prepared to fund to clean up.

In Yugoslavia’s case, this was far more expensive than the cost of investing in diplomatic initiatives to bribe the reckless Yugoslavs into calming down.

What are feisty young Chinese or Indian diplomats now drafting in their European Embassies? Maybe a paper entitled ‘The eurozone: MTS, or non-MTS?’

Will they be allowed to send it back to HQ?

Read the whole thing.

The punditry gushes forth re Tony Blair and his memoirs.

Here on the Right is Simon Heffer, quiet Ayn Rand fan and very conservative in all respects, liking Mr Blair (whom he knows) but being baffled by the poor writing:

It appears to be a book written in tune with all the most unpleasant and cynical marketing techniques of modern publishing. Its tenor is often pure Sylvie Krin. The gossip in it will amuse those who like such things – whether about Mr Blair's liking a drink, his lusts for the late Diana, Princess of Wales, or the Queen's being "haughty" (a somewhat off-colour observation for her former first minister to make, we should reflect) – but is hardly becoming of an elder statesman.

How much this is the result of an instruction from his publishers to provide something that will make money, and how much it is the product of Mr Blair's own personality, one cannot be sure.

And on the Left, Mehdi Hasan at the New Statesman who looks with some scorn at the Blair record on Iraq:

Six of the country's top academic experts on Iraq and international security warned TB, in a face-to-face meeting in November 2002, that the consequences of an invasion could be catastrophic.

Cambridge University's George Joffe, one of the six invited to Downing Street, got the impression of "someone with a very shallow mind, who's not interested in issues other than the personalities of the top people, no interest in social forces, political trends, etc".

... No, I just think you're being dishonest, Tony. Seven years on from Iraq, nothing has changed.

One of the odd arguments against the Blair policy on Iraq is that it blames the West in general and Bush/Blair in particular for all the suffering caused by UN sanctions against Saddam's Iraq before the invasion. The Hasan piece drones on in this sense:

No mention here of the sanctions on Iraq, imposed by the United Nations, and enforced by the United States and the United Kingdom. Those sanctions caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, and were described by the former UN humanitarian co-ordinator in Iraq, Dennis Halliday, as a form of "genocide".

As even the Humanitarian Panel of the Security Council noted in March 1999: "Even if not all suffering in Iraq can be imputed to external factors, especially sanctions, the Iraqi people would not be undergoing such deprivations in the absence of prolonged measures imposed by the Security Council and the effects of the war".

What is it with Leftists? They say they want multilateralism and non-violent pressure against unjust regimes which brutalise international law and attack their neighbours. In this case they got exactly that.

Saddam invaded Kuwait and the planet more or less united around the proposition that he should be thrown off the premises. With bizarre restraint the first President Bush did not used the US presence in Iraq after Saddam's defeat to topple him.

Which meant that other measures were then needed to keep this madman under control. Including sanctions.

The whole point of sanctions is that they have bad effects. Admittedly the broader the sanctions, the worse the effects on ordinary people and the erosion of middle-class social stability. That, presumably, is again an intended market signal to the masses concerned to rise up and overthrow the regime provoking negative international reaction which is damaging their interests.

In practice odious regimes do well from sanctions and often even manage to blame the sanctioneers for the negative results, as happened in the Iraq case.

The core point is that if ordinary Iraqis suffered pain and deprivation from the sanctions regime, there was a simple answer.

Saddam could have agreed to step down to end the suffering of Iraq and its people, maybe negotiating some sort of immunity guarantees and/or safe passage to a state ready to host him. The international community thereupon could and would have helped Iraq supervise free and fair elections and so bring about a generously supported transition to reasonable modern pluralism.

That approach would have avoided all the misery and violence which happened.

That such misery and violence did in fact happen was squarely attributable not to Bush and Blair but to Saddam's and his national socialist regime's greedy desire to cling to power, no matter what.

Thus Leftish/progressive moaning about Blair's policy on this point at least is trivially dishonest, if not wicked propaganda.

That said, I don't think I'll be buying this book. Mawkishly written, plus the fact that Blair left Brown and so many other misfits in key positions for so long showed that, basically, he put his wretched party's interests (and his own) ahead of those of the UK. I have paid enough for his selfishness already.

Christopher Myers, the newly appointed 'Special Adviser' to Foreign Secretary William Hague, has resigned amidst a gush of crass innuendo from Guido and others re a possible homosexual relationship between Hague and Myers. 

Willaim Hague's statement on the issue has dignity and barely concealed anger - one of the most remarkable (and frank) things ever said by any Foreign Minister anywhere?

Iain Dale is upset, somehow assuming that this a bleak day for blogging and that 'political blogging' as such is diminished by this episode:

For those who doubt it, they forget (probably conveniently) that I spoke out against the bloggers who accused Gordon Brown of having mental problems. I freely admit that I don't get it right all the time, but when I get it wrong big time I try to hold my hands up and apologise.

I hope that happens in this case. The fact that Guido Fawkes has printed the Hague statement with no added comment indicates a growing realisation (I hope) that he called this one wrong.

I am afraid that all of us who blog have been sullied by this experience, even though only one blog was making the insinuations. I said on Radio 4's PM that there was part of me tonight that is ashamed to call myself a political blogger this evening, and I meant it. That may sound a bit holier than thou, but it is how I feel.

A somewhat self-absorbed and self-indulgent view? Why should he think that 'all of us who blog' have been sullied by this experience?

I don't.

Do journalists for serious newspapers feel 'sullied' by the ravings of tabloids? No.

None of this would have happened had Mr Myers not been given a unique and influentual role at the heart of UK foreign policy work. William Hague in his statement defended the appointment of Mr Myers thus:

Christopher Myers has demonstrated commitment and political talent over the last eighteen months. He is easily qualified for the job he holds.

The fact remains that there is not a whisker of evident benefit coming to taxpayers from this appointment. Even if (as some have wondered) Mr Myers is qualified for the job of an FCO Special Adviser, the job (in my view) should not exist in the first place at a time of such a squeeze on public finances.

Guido looks to have blown it on this one, but he is merely the latest and noisiest exponent of a fine tradition of political muckrakers.

See eg this from Zoe Archer, another story of people supposedly sharing a room:

... 18th century scandal rags gave readers plenty of outrageous behavior. Consider, for example Mrs. Crackenthorpe reporting on:

...Madam Slender-sense, who is lately fallen ill of a swelling she receiv'd by a slip the last ball night. Some are so rude as to say that Beau Garsoon, the French dancing master, was the occasion of it; and Mrs. Manlove, who generally searches into the bottom of such an affair, solemnly protests she saw them go up one pair of stairs together. What they did there, she can't tell, but the lady has been ailing ever since.

There was even a European angle:

... the French exile libellistes who flocked to London to publish scandalous or sexually salacious pamphlets in the hope of extorting lavish suppression fees. These ‘smut-mongering’ pamphleteers have become prominent figures in the recent historiography of the French revolution, with many historians contending that their ‘desacralizing’ and frequently pornographic publications sapped the foundations of the monarchy.

Not a bleak day for anything.

Just the unruly and sometimes downright unpleasant din of our hard-won freedom to lambast our leaders, hard at work.

Update: Guido apparently has replied himself on Iain's blog. Scroll down through the comments:

If ever there was a time for our leaders not only to behave with propriety, but to be seem to behave with propriety, this is it. It is disappointing to watch you climb on a moral high horse and go in the wrong direction...

Working on some slides for a Mediation Technique presentation in Geneva next week.

Mediation as a professional discipline has some core assumptions. One of the most noted is the idea that there are three levels in the way people look at disputes, namely PIN:

• Positions
• Interests
• Needs

Thus Kosovo. The Serbs and Albanians alike say noisily "Kosovo is ours!" They have incompatible positions.

Yet 'below' that level there are (it is argued) some areas of common interest - not fighting over the place, moving towards EU membership, getting richer and so on.

And below even that, maybe some common needs: maintaining credibility, not being humiliated, staying alive and so on.

Thus a mediator trying to help Serbia and Kosovo sort themselves out will want to move the discussion from Positions through Interests towards Needs, exploring ideas for building on those areas where existential agreement can be found rather than focusing on implacable differences.

Another way of looking at negotiation is a ZOPA: Zone of Possible Agreement.

• Mary wants to pay between £5000 and £8000 for a new car.
• Nancy is ready to sell her car for as little as £6000 but hopes to get £9000.

Somewhere between £6000 and £8000 is the zone of possible agreement, a price both could accept with more or less satisfaction.

Thus the skilled mediator coaxes the parties to move from their extreme positions and look instead at where interests might overlap.

In the Kosovo case, even the International Crisis Group is now looking at territory swaps as the potential ZOPA:

The international community should facilitate as complete a settlement as is possible, leaving it up to the parties themselves to decide how far and in what direction they can go to achieve the goal of recognition.

The most controversial outcome that might emerge from negotiations would be a Northern Kosovo-Preševo Valley swap in the context of mutual recognition and settlement of all other major issues. Neither Pristina nor Belgrade proposes this openly, but officials in both capitals have begun to speak of it quietly in contacts with Crisis Group.

Many in the international community would be unhappy with this option. Crisis Group believes that ruling out this or any specific mutually-agreed option from the onset, however, would risk freezing the Kosovo-Serbia conflict, with no guarantee of eventual resolution.

So much for theory.

All of this assumes some sort of intrinsic ability of the parties to look 'rationally' at what they want now and in the future. To weigh up options in some sort of calm, cooperative spirit, based upon (ultimately) the motherly comforting notion that we are all human beings on Planet Earth together and that there are better things to do here than fight.

Which is usually fine, or at least good enough.

But there are cases where parties each seemingly have internalised different, incompatible levels of rationality.

Such as, in the Balkans, Inat. Someone playing the Inat card is claiming to gain psychic or negotiating strength from the very perverse intensity of his/her irrationality:

See - you are right to say that what I am doing is against my interests! But that's the point.

The fact that I am prepared to do insane things in response to their antics shows just how strongly I feel about this!

And because I am being driven insane, I can not be reasoned with in your bourgeois/sentimental way. Take it or leave it! 

It may be that it is all a wearying bluff, a highly calculated attempt to extract specific negotiating advantage by feigning wild-eyed lack of calculation.

But what if it is real? Or if the effort of doing all that feigning somehow warps the mind of the feigner and starts to create a genuine level of irrationality if not madness?

Sure, with enough therapy and patient counselling this may be turned round.

Does anyone have a quiet couch big enough for Serbs, Albanians, Macedonians, Bosniacs and Croats to lie on for a couple of decades while they get it all off their chests?  

Sigh.

Another thoughtful and intelligent website to read: Big Questions Online.

Try this one by Susan Jacoby:

When my friend saw one of her favorite young Afghan-American women — a high school senior — weeping in the dining room, she asked what was wrong. “Oh, madam professor,” the girl replied, “my father has arranged for me to meet my future husband. He is 40 years old, and the wedding will take place in six months. I wanted so much to go to college, and this will not be permitted.”

My friend replied gently, “You know, Yasmin, you don’t have to marry anyone in this country because your parents say so. There are organizations to help girls like you think these things through. There are college scholarships. I can give you the names of people to talk to.” Another resident of this community sharply reproved my friend, saying, “We have no right to interfere with her culture, her religion, her family,”

Wrong. This type of “interference” — telling a troubled young woman that she has choices other than an arranged marriage — is exactly what a true liberal ought to be doing. The idea that someone should ignore the tears of a 17-year-old who says she is being pushed to give up her education is utterly perverse.

Maybe I need an iPad to keep track of everything without sitting in front of the PC all day?

Here is the full text of President Obama's speech (in fact TV address) on Iraq/Afghanistan.

Conservative-minded commentators in the USA give it mixed reviews (of course). Sample a few over at the Corner.

Ignoring - as far as one can - the substance, what about Technique?

First, it's long. Nearly 2600 words. That gives a large canvas on which to pose different questions and then give convincing answers.

Obama starts by defining the Iraq intervention in what is now a characteristically detached/abstract way:

A war to disarm a state became ... a fight against an insurgency.

Huh?

The words United Nations and Saddam do not figure in the speech. What was the so-called 'insurgency' all about? What did the various 'terrorists' and 'extremists' mentioned in the address want to achieve?

In short, what values were at stake? Not really explained:

The Americans who have served in Iraq completed every mission they were given. They defeated a regime that had terrorized its people. Together with Iraqis and coalition partners who made huge sacrifices of their own, our troops fought block by block to help Iraq seize the chance for a better future. They shifted tactics to protect the Iraqi people; trained Iraqi Security Forces; and took out terrorist leaders.

Because of our troops and civilians –and because of the resilience of the Iraqi people – Iraq has the opportunity to embrace a new destiny, even though many challenges remain.

Iraq no longer is terrorised by its own regime:

I encourage Iraq’s leaders to move forward with a sense of urgency to form an inclusive government that is just, representative, and accountable to the Iraqi people.

Does Obama have any view on whether that same sort of governance structure should be rolled out more widely in the region? Who knows?

No message for the neighbouring Iran regime, or indeed for the pro-reform masses there who too are struggling for a better deal? Or for other violent oppressors round the world? No.

Part of the problem with giving such a long address is maintaining a coherent but not boring argument. Speechwriters accordingly put in verbal padding to add colour. The results (if they are not careful) can be clumsy and/or mixed metaphors:

... a belief that out of the ashes of war, a new beginning could be born in this cradle of civilization

our nation’s strength and influence abroad must be firmly anchored in our prosperity at home. And the bedrock of that prosperity must be a growing middle class...

Billions of young people want to move beyond the shackles of poverty and conflict

In announcing the end of US combat missions in Iraq, the President might have offered some thoughts on the wider lessons to be drawn from this episode. Instead we get only one:

... one of the lessons of our effort in Iraq is that American influence around the world is not a function of military force alone. We must use all elements of our power – including our diplomacy, our economic strength, and the power of America’s example – to secure our interests and stand by our allies.

True enough but not especially convincing, the more so since Obama conspicuously did not describe Iraq as an 'ally'.

Given the dire state of the Democrats in the US opinion polls, it maybe is no surprise that the President used this address as a pep-talk for his domestic agenda. But the shift in gear into extended passages about the need for new domestic policies was abrupt and somehow not quite right for this occasion.

Worse, our old enemy the Musty Speech reared its musty head. According to Obama the following are musts:

• we must never lose sight of what’s at stake
• we must use all elements of our power
• we must project a vision of the future
• that effort must begin within our own borders
• our nation’s strength and influence abroad must be firmly anchored in our prosperity at home
• the bedrock of that prosperity must be a growing middle class
• we must tackle those challenges at home
• we must give all our children the education they deserve
• we must jumpstart industries that create jobs
• we must unleash the innovation that allows new products to roll off our assembly lines
• it must be our central mission as a people
• today’s servicemen and women must have the chance to apply their gifts
• we must earn victory through the success of our partners

As I put it in a quite different context:

Speeches boil down to basic messages. What was the message here? Not really clear (and perhaps that's the Obama post-modern message?)?

Victor Davis Hanson:

Obama warns against “open-ended wars,” as if they are almost animate things. But wars end, not when they reach a rational, previously agreed-upon expiration date, but usually when tough, specific wartime choices are made that lead to victory or end in defeat.

One party must decide – for good or bad reasons – that it doesn’t want to fight to win, or simply doesn’t believe it has the resources for victory.

To say that “open-ended wars” are undesirable is a banality that offers no guidance for these real-life choices. A better truism is that America should not fight wars it does not intend to win.

Quite so.

Update: Roger Kimball magnificently accomplishes something most of us would have considered impossible and few of us would have dared attempt, namely linking this Obama address to the egregious burblings of Spode in Code of the Woosters:

Finally! The 'feedback' compilation arrives from a course I ran a few months ago for EU colleagues in Brussels on the general theme of Ethical Dilemmas in Diplomacy.

Everyone is dutifully tasked to complete these forms at the end of a course. A bundle of these forms show trends. Were the great mass of people pleased with what they heard, or not? What sessions stood out on the day? Any obvious clunkers?

But what catch the eye (of course) are the disobliging but somehow oddly perceptive sneers of the disgruntled few:

Rather patronising and arrogant style, giving examples/descriptions irrelevant to the topic of the training. Rather a stroll down the memory lane of a retired diplomat

For all the impressive scale of the global training industry these days, the whole business is to a large extent hit and miss.

F'rinstance. How many readers here have had professional training courses of some sort since starting work?

Answer: everyone.

What courses actually imparted something memorable and operationally useful?

Which of those courses gave insights you can recall and still use weeks, months or even years afterwards?

Almost none.

Back in the FCO I recall a senior management meeting when I suggested that we freeze 'training' until we had done some sort of survey of which training courses had actually been effective, and what techniques had been especially worthwhile in getting key points across to the punters. Could any one there immediately recall a brilliant training outcome?

Glazed uneasy looks around the table, followed by quick change of subject.

Back in 1992 or so I did a good management course with the London Business School. I can still remember a number of the sessions, but above all one on How to Break Bad News.

You need to tell someone that they have been fired or have not promoted or that a relative has died suddenly? Yes, there are ways to do this which help the person hearing the bad news cope with the bolt from the blue, and which help the person giving the bad news pace the occasion firmly but kindly.

I have had to break bad news to people thereafter, and (on the whole) have done so well, drawing on the practical techniques imparted on that one training session. Really good.

Otherwise I have sat through all sorts of other courses which have made no impact whatsoever, other than to allow the trainers and trainees smugly to tick lots of Investors in People and suchlike boxes.

My own forays into the world of training since leaving the FCO have taught me a lot. Such as the central role of video analysis.

There is just nothing to compare with being filmed then watching yourself in a role-play of some sort, even for just a few minutes. The gripping horror of the occasion is utterly memorable and so has a transformatory effect, as I noted last week in Warsaw.

We ran short mock TV interviews for the senior course members. They seemed to learn more about themselves and about 'communication' in those short role-plays than they had done in years of more formal training based on presentations and principles.

Conclusion?

Sometimes courses generate such seething loathing that participants invent new portmanteau words to express their contempt, in this case damning my tendency to be at once too anecdotal and too toadying:

Much too much anectodiacal (huge loss of time). Need of more time for case studies and exchange between participants.

Fine. Give me more time, and you'll get better training.

Suggestion  Readers! Send in short examples of what training has worked for you and why! Then I'll compile them and we can start to change the world

Over at Business and Politics I peer at the BBC through a powerful microscope.

Droll opening paragraph, or at least I thought so.

Should women be allowed to go topless?

That's the question posed by National Go Topless Day. Which maybe you missed last week. Too bad.

Yet it somehow seems to me to be the wrong question, or at least it is replete with all sorts of curious assumptions which may need challenging:

My dear fellow, who will let you?

That's not the point. The point is, who will stop me?

Back from Warsaw this afternoon to find myself at 12th place on the 2010 Total Politics UK Libertarian Blog list.

Up from 17th place last year, and just below the Adam Smith Institute. Wo!

Big Libertarian climber this year is Anna Raccoon, jumping from from 13th place to 6th. Here she is today, giving us a story with (as it happens) a Polish angle.

Here is another top performer, Devil's Knife aka Devil's Kitchen - always good to see what he has to tell us about fake charities - charities whose dominant source of income is taxpayers' money, and not all of which are Leftist.

Many thanks to all readers who took the trouble to support this blog by voting in the survey this year.

Much appreciated.

Part of next week will be spent giving some Speechwriting Training.

One of the things I have been taught on my Mediation training is the technique of 'reflecting back'.

In other words, a good mediator (so it is said) is not one who shows 'neutrality' by being aloof and detached from the feuding parties. That may work in winning some credibility, but it is not enough to win their trust.

To do that effectively you need to tune in to the emotional signals coming from the parties.

If they get angry and agitated, you should try to raise the tempo and 'intensity' of your reaction to their anger/agitation so that they feel that you are 'with' them - at least to the point of understanding why they are upset. For example by leaning towards them and raising your voice a clear notch.

The problem with someone giving a speech is exactly the opposite. Normally the speaker is quite interested in what s/he has to say, but the audience by contrast need to be convinced to tune in to the speaker and not play with an e-gadget until the dreary session ends.

So the speaker has the difficult task of quickly catching the audience's attention and then gently pulling them up through the gears to raise them to somewhere close to where the speaker himself is.

The speaker in other words has a higher level of 'intensity' than the audience. And if that is not managed well by the speaker, it can lead to disaster!

For a classic high-profile case of two speakers failing to get this right and being roundly humiliated, check out this one:

Thus it was that as the speeches droned on, more and more Bosnians present simply tuned out and carried on chatting among themselves.

An unseemly competition started. Which was louder? The mass of Bosnian guests, or the VIP speakers?

When the German Foreign Minister got going, a mini-crisis was reached. He could not be heard at all other than by shouting.

Which he did. To little avail.

The louder he went, the more the massed Bosnians themselves talked loudly, almost as if (perish the thought) they spontaneously thought it would be a good Balkan joke to drown him out.

So we connoisseurs of the Diplomatic Grotesque witnessed a fascinating moment.

A leading European politician from a country which had given generously to the post-war reconstruction effort was left bawling at a large crowd of senior Bosnians that they should be grateful to Europe, and respond accordingly.

And they did respond. They just ignored him.

All not-so-obvious enough.

But can you train people to cope with this sort of thing when they are not necessarily good speakers and may think they have little to say? And where does the speech-writer fit in?

Good questions. Let's see.

Off go sundry Crawfs to Poland for a few days, myself mainly working.

Not much posted here this month. Am I running out of steam for this blogging business? Or is it just grey, muggy, flat August malaise time?

Sigh.

Quickies to keep you amused for a few days while I am away ...

A gripping piece by Parag Khanna on the rise of cities over at Foreign Policy. OK, plenty is already out there on this subject, but this analysis looks at the wider foreign policy issues:

... just 100 cities account for 30 percent of the world's economy, and almost all its innovation. Many are world capitals that have evolved and adapted through centuries of dominance: London, New York, Paris. New York City's economy alone is larger than 46 of sub-Saharan Africa's economies combined. Hong Kong receives more tourists annually than all of India.

These cities are the engines of globalization, and their enduring vibrancy lies in money, knowledge, and stability. They are today's true Global Cities...

Neither 19th-century balance-of-power politics nor 20th-century power blocs are useful in understanding this new world. Instead, we have to look back nearly a thousand years, to the medieval age in which cities such as Cairo and Hangzhou were the centers of global gravity, expanding their influence confidently outward in a borderless world.

... perhaps borders don't need to change at all, but rather melt away, so long as locals have access to the nearest big city no matter what "country" it is in. This is, after all, how things really work on the ground, even if our maps don't always reflect this reality.

Think of the human energy whirring away in these new conglomerations. Where does that leave the rest of us?

Maybe the wholepoint of becoming irrelevant, marginalised and parochial is that ... you don't realise it's happened?

Back on home ground, Simon Heffer reminds us of the use of the gerund:

I once got a job by finding 24 mistakes in a piece of prose in which I had been told I would find 20, and which had been given to me as part of a test during an interview: this was because the person who had set the test, good though his English was, did not know about gerunds.

Therefore he had not seen that phrases such as “it was the shop being closed that was the last straw” should have read “it was the shop’s being closed”.

Quite. But if almost no-one other than Simon grasps that nice grammar point in English any more, has that part of the language effectively died out?

Finally, I have mentioned Ray Bradbury here on this site. He's still writing away at 90. Here is a glowing account of his life and significance by James E Person Jnr:

What remains for those who haven’t read Bradbury for some time are memorable books worth rereading and a collage of unforgettable images: the canals of Mars filled with fragrant wine, a gun that fires deadly bees, a man covered with animated tattoos, a cocky gun-slinging bully sitting down in a barber chair for his final shave at the hands of a barber he’s threatened once too often, a spaceship harvesting a small fragment of the sun, a frightened old woman racing home through the midnight streets of Green Town and groping for the light switch in a darkened room in which a stranger awaits, and an adolescent boy fearing for the life of his humble, decent father amid the autumn twilight in a small Midwestern town.

So if you are not familiar with this genius, buy this to get started

Plenty more Bradbury marvels where that comes from.

S'long.

What? You want one more?

Lileks as always is on fire. Can you look at his searching deconstruction of Peter Lorre in Mr Moto's Last Warning and not burst out laughing?

No, you can't.

Do widzenia!

President Obama has pronounced on the Cordoba Center (aka Ground Zero Mosque) controversy.Speaking to a Ramadan gathering he said this:

Recently, attention has been focused on the construction of mosques in certain communities -– particularly New York.

Now, we must all recognize and respect the sensitivities surrounding the development of Lower Manhattan.  The 9/11 attacks were a deeply traumatic event for our country.  And the pain and the experience of suffering by those who lost loved ones is (sic) just unimaginable.  So I understand the emotions that this issue engenders.  And Ground Zero is, indeed, hallowed ground. 

But let me be clear.  As a citizen, and as President, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country. And that includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances. 

This is America.  And our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable.  The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country and that they will not be treated differently by their government is essential to who we are.  The writ of the Founders must endure.

... And let us also remember who we’re fighting against, and what we’re fighting for.  Our enemies respect no religious freedom.  Al Qaeda’s cause is not Islam -– it’s a gross distortion of Islam.  These are not religious leaders -– they’re terrorists who murder innocent men and women and children.  In fact, al Qaeda has killed more Muslims than people of any other religion -– and that list of victims includes innocent Muslims who were killed on 9/11.

Good, principled stuff? Indeed rather safe, placing an emphasis on traditional US constitutional principles around which all might rally?

So the media thought, frothed up by White House spinners.

But then it all unravelled at speed, with all sorts of Democrats moving to put some distance between the President and themselves in this issue and sundry 'clarifications' coming from the White House.

Power Line astutely suggests where the President went wrong:

Obama's Cairo speech, delivered shortly after he became president, also relied heavily on the language of synthesis. The Jews have been hard done by, and so have the Palestinians, he argued. The synthesis lies in both groups recognizing the other's grievances, and proceeding from there.

The appeal of this type of rhetoric is obvious. First, Obama was able to cast himself as a reasonable man, capable of seeing both sides of an issue. Second, he was able to cast himself as a decent and charitable man, capable of seeing the good in the fiercest of clashing adversaries. Third, he was able to cast himself as an intelligent man (albeit in the facile manner of a bright college sophomore or a slightly above average law student), capable of finding similarities where lesser intellects can spot only differences.

Finally, and most importantly, Obama the synthesizer cast himself as a problem solver. His seeming ability to identify common ground was not just an exercise in intellectual nimbleness and human decency. For many, it held out the promise that longstanding conflicts might be made to recede...

... But Obama did not embrace, even intellectually, a synthesis in this matter. Rather, he came down squarely on the side of the imam. He spoke up on behalf of his right to build the mosque on "hallowed ground" without ever suggesting that doing so might be wrong or misguided.

In fact, he implied that putting the mosque at this spot was a favorable development because our willingness to have it there reaffirms who we are as a people and drives home the contrast between our values and those of jihadists...

Jonah Goldberg is unimpressed with the way Obama has tackled this one:

The supposedly pragmatic political wise men have been blinded by ideology or incompetence and have failed to see what was so obviously around the corner. A big, honking Islamic center built to capitalize on 9/11, in a building that was damaged on 9/11? What could go wrong?

... “He felt he had a responsibility to speak,” said David Axelrod, as if he were drafting the inscription on Obama’s Profiles in Courage Award. But by Saturday morning, Obama tried to weasel out of it with the sort of lawyerly parsing everybody despises. Speaking to reporters in Florida, Obama claimed he had no position on the “wisdom” of the project, and anyone who mistook his academic comments about building a mosque in Lower Manhattan for an endorsement misunderstood him.

Well, if his real intent was to remain agnostic, he should fire his speechwriter immediately.

Of course that wasn’t his intent. He wanted to seem heroically principled. But when he was hit with an entirely foreseeable backlash (according to one poll, nearly 70 percent of Americans oppose the mosque), he once again led with his glass jaw and, in effect, told everybody they were too dimwitted to grasp the brilliant nuance of his remarks.

Fire the Obama speechwriter? Yes.

Forgetting the merits, look at the poor technique and remember that it is not that politicians make mistakes as they all do - it is the quality of those mistakes which are so revealing.

Basically, the Obama 'remarks' erred towards a trite, oh-too-clever legal formalism which was clearly just not politically or morally good enough in the circumstances.

As some Democrat-leaning commentators are saying, President Bush would not have been so obviously banal. Whether or not you liked the policy, Bush's speeches had a sense of intellectual integrity, of someone not ducking the hard questions. Of, in a word, leadership.

Here's what I would have drafted. Note not so much the language, but the underlying chain of thought:

The 9/11 attacks were a deeply traumatic event for our country.  The pain and  suffering for those who lost loved ones are unimaginable.  Ground Zero is, indeed, hallowed ground. 

Some people see the 9/11 attacks as an onslaught by Islam itself against the USA. That's not what I believe. Al Qaeda’s cause is not Islam -– it’s a gross distortion of Islam.  These are not religious leaders -– they’re terrorists who murder innocent men and women and children.  In fact, al Qaeda has killed more Muslims than people of any other religion -– and that list of victims includes innocent Muslims who were killed on 9/11.

Our country allows freedom of religion. We have thousands of churches and synagogues and chapels and mosques. People are free to build new ones, subject to local planning laws and such formalities.

This is not the case in many parts of the world. And it is bound to offend and even annoy many Americans if support for this new Islamic centre in this special area of New York comes from countries which oppress Christianity, Judaism other religions in the name of Islam, or from Islamic groups which demand respect for their supposed sensitivities but rail against the sensitivities of others.

Tolerance is not a blank cheque for those who think ill of our country to abuse its freedom. But we do not deal with intolerance by being intolerant ourselves...

Something like that would have touched on the core policy and philosophical dilemmas here, at least obliquely. And sent a firm but friendly message to Islam that yes, it too needs to work towards the highlands of freedom and open-mindedness.

Instead, as Goldberg says the President's poor drafting has simply made the whole business much worse, not least for Obama himself:

By elevating an already stupid idea and a poisonous debate, he forced everyone to take a side on a polarizing issue (including vulnerable Democrats like Nevada senator Harry Reid, who, late Monday, came out against the mosque), while undermining his own credibility, not to mention America’s reputation around the world.

Here is a round-up of interesting links on the so-called GZM controversy in the USA - should a Muslim cultural centre cum mosque be built close to the site of the 9/11 terror attacks on the World Trade Center in New York?

Or not? If not, why not?

Peter Beinart says that in revealing a geyser of Islamophobic hysteria (or something like that) America has disgraced itself:

Once upon a time, the “war on terror” was supposed to bring American values to Saudi Arabia. Now Newt Gingrich says we shouldn’t build a mosque in Lower Manhattan until the Saudis build churches and synagogues in Mecca—which is to say, we’re bringing Saudi values to the United States.

Not exactly.

What in fact has happened is an unSaudi-like good ol' US public intellectual ding-dong about Rules and Values, with all sorts of people on Left and Right alike spiralling off in unexpected directions.

Take William Dalrymple, not normally associated with wild-eyed radicalism, who points out some of the subtler issues involved. The Cordoba Centre is being supported by the Sufi tendency in Islam, one the West should encourage:

Feisal Abdul Rauf of the Cordoba Initiative is one of America’s leading thinkers of Sufism, the mystical form of Islam, which in terms of goals and outlook couldn’t be farther from the violent Wahhabism of the jihadists... 

His slightly New Agey rhetoric makes him sound, for better or worse, like a Muslim Deepak Chopra. But in the eyes of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, he is an infidel-loving, grave-worshiping apostate; they no doubt regard him as a legitimate target for assassination.

Victor Hanson Davis is more cynical:

Here at home well-meaning liberals would applaud the audacity of hope in positioning a mosque near the 9/11 site in order to “commemorate” the “tragedy,” as a token of tolerance where all could come together and thus avoid another misunderstanding of the sort that sent two airliners crashing into two skyscrapers. 

Abroad, the message would, of course, be interpreted quite differently: To the radical Islamists, a mosque rising near Ground Zero well before a new World Trade Center is constructed is a message of Islamic triumphalism — in the long tradition of minarets on the conquered Santa Sophia in Istanbul, the eighth-century Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem rising on the site of the destroyed Jewish Second Temple, and the great mosque at Cordoba retrofitted from the gutted Christian Church of St. Vincent.

Elsewhere too views diverge. See eg some Muslim Republicans:

Muslim Republicans like David Ramadan and Randa Fahmy Hudome see it as a free-exercise issue that shouldn’t be demagogued for midterm gain, and longtime blogger Aziz Poonawalla gave a thoughtful interview to fellow blogger Scott Payne reiterating his support for the project and his misgivings about how both opponents and Park51 management have handled the subject.

Why not go all the way on tolerance while we're at it? Build a bar for gay Muslims right next to the new Center:

"I hope that the mosque owners will be as open to the bar, as I am to the new mosque. After all, the belief driving them to open up their center near Ground Zero, is no different than mine. My place, however, will have better music."

UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg offers this thought:

All parents have a responsibility to nurture the potential in their children. I know how difficult it can be to find the time and the energy to help with homework at the end of a busy day. But if we give them that kind of attention and support when they are young, they will feel the benefits for the rest of their lives.

He singled out universities as riven by "educational apartheid", dominated by students from better-off homes.

Today we sit here twitching with fear as we await the latest Crawf AS-level exam results. How have we done as parents? Have we passed the Clegg Test?

I was brought up in a family which had never had a university graduate - back in the mid-1900s university was still very much a privilege for the better-off. But we had books. Indeed, my mother's house still has books. In boxes, on shelves, in piles. Masses of books, all read at one point or other but now gathering forlorn dust.

Books from that period were written in the pre-Internet and digital publishing age, by people trained in Victorian/Edwardian values of scholarship and rather heavy style. To me now most of them are unreadable. But who will want them?

By contrast books now are so much better presented; lively in style and design. We keep buying them, as I found my Sony Reader far too clunky to use and I have not yet got round to a Kindle or iPad.

So, for example, try this excellent book about prime numbers which I was reading last night:

Beautifully written, accessible to non-mathematicians, explaining vast and subtle things in a gripping way. Buy it.

Otherwise Crawf Minima is ploughing through the Moomintroll stories:

And I am reading her I, Robot by Isaac Asimov:

Every schoolgirl needs to know the Three Rules of Robotics. Forget the silly film. These stories written decades ago are fascinating for their moral content and technical prescience in so many ways. But see too their failure to spot that once humans can create brilliant robots, they also will have worked out how to do away with heavy robot manuals when they go wrong. 

My father's principle was simple. If you want a book, we'll get it. That's the same way we do things. Hence a lot of books round our house. Including even this dubious specimen:

We don't drink much or smoke. Spare cash goes into this sort of thing. Does that give young Crawfs an edge in life, or at least a keen intellectual curiosity and pleasure in the unexpected and difficult? I hope so. 

Stop Press   News just in. 7 Maths AS Levels taken this year. Marks from 90-100% in five of them. Yo.

The Daily Telegraph reports that the new EU Ambassador In Washington Joao Vale de Almeida is bent on elbowing out of the way such diplomatic minnows as HM Ambassador Nigel Sheinwald:

Mr Vale de Almeida has stressed to Washington officials and politicians that under the EU's' Lisbon Treaty, he has more power than his predecessors. "I'm the first new type of ambassador for the European Union anywhere in the world," he said. "I'm supposed to have a wider mandate than my predecessors."

Mr Vale de Almeida said: "Our delegations now cover a wide spectrum of issues well beyond the economic dimension, trade dimension and regulatory dimension, to cover all policies in the union, including foreign policy and security policy...

In a comment that has come to symbolise the American view of the EU, Henry Kissinger, the former US secretary of state, is once said to asked: "When I want to talk to Europe, who do I call?"

In a response to that question, Mr Vale de Almeida declared: "In this area code, you call me." The ambassador insisted that he did not wish to "impose myself" on member states' ambassadors, who will continue to oversee "bilateral matters." But he declared: "Where we have a common position, I am the one leading the show."

Where to start?

Let's start here, with Mr Vale de Almeida's appointment to this top job. A controversial choice.

His mainstream diplomatic and sharp-end overseas credentials? Nil, other than an important job running Commission Chairman Barroso's office in Brussels, reached via the giddy heights of the EU's policies on something called Youth:

Youth, Society, Communication. Particular responsibility for Youth policies and programmes, including White Paper on future of Youth Policy in Europe and Open Method of Coordination on Youth

So when Hillary Clinton picks up the telephone at 0300 hours to ask the new EU Ambassador about a sudden crisis, she is not likely to get an informed and operationally nimble response (unless of course the issue involves Coordinating EU Youth, in which case she has hit the jackpot).

Surely there's more to it than this? As Mr Vale de Almeida himself says, where the EU has a Common Position he leads the show.

But therefore what exactly?

Common Positions tend to be limp, unreadable texts drawn up from lowest common denominator drafting exercises expressing such agreement as might be manageable as between 27 countries.

See eg this one on Cuba which has floated listlessly, dead in the water since 1996(!). The point being that there is no consensus to say anything simple and reasonable such as "The EU calls on the Cuban leadership to hold free and fair elections".

On perhaps the one basic issue where the USA might expect the EU to take a robust and united view, namely which countries in Europe exist, there is no Common Position: various EU member states do not recognise Kosovo.

In other words, if there is a Common Position it probably means that the subject is operationally unimportant or at least politically routine, even if various and not unworthy EU spending activities will flow therefrom.

Moreover, the EU Ambassador in Washington has a tough job in maintaining even that Position. He dare not stray far if at all from it, lest he annoy one or other member state who approved that Position and only that Position.

This means that if Hillary asks him what direction EU policy is likely to take if (say) things get worse in N Korea, he'll have no mandate to have a sensible conversation with her. Because the direction of said EU policy - if there is to be one going beyond mere declaratory noises - will be shaped mainly by the EU Bigs (London, Berlin, Paris and so on) ,as always. As he will have to tell her if she rudely asks.

In other words, the EU has indeed given Washington a single telephone number to call.

But all Washinghton really gets is a telephone answering service with a complicated digitalised menu leading to monotonous readings of assorted Common Positions which the USA already has in its files.

For a sensible conversation looking at a wide range of options including top-level handling of the N Korea portfolio at the UN in New York, here's the place they need to call.

The grim profile of the US Federal Reserve's balance sheet.

Volcanic?

Here's an interesting one.

The German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle is homosexual. He has decided not to take his partner with him on official visits to countries where homosexuality is a prosecutable crime.

His somewhat obscure argument as quoted in the excellent Spiegel Online:

We want to promote the concept of tolerance in the world ...

But we also don't want to achieve the opposite by behaving imprudently. At the same time it is important that we live according to our own measures of tolerance and that we do not adopt the sometimes less tolerant measures of others.

This position prompts an energetic rant from one Henryk Broder:

One doesn't have to read his remark twice to understand what it signifies: Tolerance is a wonderful thing, but we shouldn't push our luck. This is more than the usual hot air from a politician. Westerwelle's words are an example of moral hara-kiri in slow motion, and they're a disgrace for Germany...